SERIAL UNCUT (19 page)

The sound of someone chewing popcorn.

Maggie wondered what she should do. Say
something? Maybe this was all some sort of mistake, some confused
tourist who had walked into the wrong house. Or perhaps this was a
robber, looking for money or drugs. Give him what he wanted, and
he'd leave. No need for anyone to get hurt.

"
Who's there?"

More munching. Closer. He was practically in
the room. She could smell the popcorn now, the butter and salt, and
the odor made her stomach do flip-flops.

"
My...medication is in the bathroom
cabinet. And my purse is on the chair by the door. Take
it."

The ruffling of a paper bag, and more
chewing. Open-mouthed chewing. Loud, like someone smacking gum. Why
wouldn't he say anything?

"
What do you want?"

No answer.

Maggie was shivering now. The tourist
scenario was gone from her head, the robber scenario fading fast. A
new scenario entered Maggie's mind. The scenario of campfire
stories and horror movies. The boogeyman, hiding under the bed. The
escaped lunatic, searching for someone to hurt, to kill.

Maggie needed to get out of there, to get
away. She could run to the car, or meet Sal on the dock and get
into his boat, or even hide out in the woods. She could hurry to
the guest bedroom, lock the door, open up the window, climb
down--

Chewing, right next to the bed. Maggie
gasped, pulling the flannel sheets to her chest. She squinted into
the darkness, could barely make out the dark figure of a man
standing a few feet away.

The bag rustled. Something touched Maggie's
face and she gasped. A tiny pat on her cheek. It happened again, on
her forehead, making her flinch. Again, and she swatted out with
her hand, finding the object on the pillow.

Popcorn. He was throwing popcorn at her.

Maggie's voice came out in a whisper.
"What...what are you going to do?"

The springs creaked as he sat on the edge of
the bed.

"
Everything," he said.

The following is an
excerpt of
Snowbound by Blake Crouch,
available everywhere from Minotaur Books in June 2010...

1

In the evening of the last good day either
of them would know for years to come, the girl pushed open the
sliding glass door and stepped through onto the back porch.

"
Daddy?"

Will Innis set the legal pad aside and made
room for Devlin to climb into his lap. His daughter was small for
eleven, felt like the shell of a child in his arms.

"
What are you doing out here?" she
asked and in her scratchy voice he could hear the remnants of her
last respiratory infection like gravel in her lungs.

"
Working up a closing for my trial in
the morning."

"
Is your client the bad guy
again?"

Will smiled. "You and your mother. I'm not
really supposed to think of it that way, sweetheart."

"
What'd he do?" His little girl's face
had turned ruddy in the sunset and the fading light brought out
threads of platinum in her otherwise midnight hair.

"
He allegedly--"

"
What's that mean?"

"
Allegedly?"

"
Yeah."

"
Means it's not been proven. He's
suspected of selling drugs."

"
Like what I take?"

"
No, your drugs are good. They help
you. He was selling, allegedly selling, bad drugs to
people."

"
Why are they bad?"

"
Because they make you lose
control."

"
Why do people take them?"

"
They like how it makes them
feel."

"
How does it make them
feel?"

He kissed her forehead and looked at his
watch. "It's after eight, Devi. Let's go bang on those lungs."

She sighed but she didn't argue. She never
tried to get out of it.

He stood up cradling his daughter and walked
over to the redwood railing.

They stared into the wilderness that
bordered Oasis Hills, their subdivision. The houses on No-Water
Lane had the Sonoran Desert for a backyard.

"
Look," he said. "See them?" A half
mile away, specks filed out of an arroyo and trotted across the
desert toward a shadeless forest of giant saguaro cacti that looked
vaguely sinister profiled against the horizon.

"
What are they?" she asked.

"
Coyotes. What do you bet they start
yapping when the sun goes down?"

After supper, he read to Devlin
from
A Wrinkle in Time
.
They'd been working their way through the penultimate chapter,
"Aunt Beast," but Devlin was exhausted and drifted off before Will
had finished the second page.

He closed the book and set it on the carpet
and turned out the light. Cool desert air flowed in through an open
window. A sprinkler whispered in the next door neighbor's yard.
Devlin yawned, made a cooing sound that reminded him of rocking her
to sleep as a newborn. Her eyes fluttered and she said very softly,
"Mom?"

"
She's working late at the clinic,
sweetheart."

"
When's she coming back?"

"
Few hours."

"
Tell her to come in and kiss
me?"

"
I will."

He was nowhere near ready for court in the
morning but he stayed, running his fingers through Devlin's hair
until she'd fallen back to sleep. Finally, he slid carefully off
the bed and walked out onto the deck to gather up his books and
legal pads. He had a late night ahead of him. A pot of strong
coffee would help.

Next door, the sprinklers had gone
quiet.

A lone cricket chirped in the desert.

Thunderless lightning sparked somewhere over
Mexico, and the coyotes began to scream.

2

The thunderstorm caught up with Rachael
Innis thirty miles north of the Mexican border. It was 9:30 p.m.,
and it had been a long day at the free clinic in Sonoyta, where she
volunteered her time and services once a week as a bilingual
psychologist. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth. High
beams lit the steam rising off the pavement, and in the rearview
mirror, Rachael saw the pair of headlights a quarter of a mile back
that had been with her for the last ten minutes.

Glowing beads suddenly appeared on the
shoulder just ahead. She jammed her foot into the brake pedal, the
Grand Cherokee fishtailing into the oncoming lane before skidding
to a stop. A doe and her fawn ventured into the middle of the road,
mesmerized by the headlights. Rachael let her forehead fall onto
the steering wheel, closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath.

The deer moved on. She accelerated the
Cherokee, another dark mile passing as pellets of hail hammered the
hood.

The Cherokee veered sharply toward the
shoulder and she nearly lost control again, trying to correct her
bearing, but the steering wheel wouldn't straighten out. Rachael
lifted her foot off the gas pedal and eased over onto the side of
the road.

When she killed the ignition all she could
hear was the rain and hail drumming on the roof. The car that had
been following her shot by. She set her glasses in the passenger
seat, opened the door, and stepped down into a puddle that engulfed
her pumps. The downpour soaked through her black suit. She
shivered. It was pitch-black between lightning strikes and she
moved forward carefully, feeling her way along the warm metal of
the hood.

A slash of lightning hit the desert
just a few hundred yards out. It set her body tingling, her ears
ringing.
I'm going to be
electrocuted.
There came a train of earsplitting
strikes, flashbulbs of electricity that lit the sky just long
enough for her to see that the tires on the driver side were still
intact.

Her hands trembled now. A tall saguaro stood
burning like a cross in the desert. She groped her way over to the
passenger side as marble-size hail collected in her hair. The
desert was electrified again, spreading wide and empty all around
her.

In the eerie blue light she saw that the
front tire on the passenger side was flat.

Back inside the Cherokee, Rachael sat behind
the steering wheel, mascara trailing down her cheeks like sable
tears. She wrung out her long black hair and massaged the headache
building between her temples. Her purse lay in the passenger
floorboard. She dragged it into her lap and shoved her hand inside,
rummaging for the cell phone. She found it, tried her husband's
number, but there was no service in the storm.

Rachael looked into the back of the
Cherokee at the spare. She had no way of contacting AAA and passing
cars would be few and far between on this remote highway at this
hour of the night.
I'll just wait and try
Will again when the storm has passed.

Squeezing the steering wheel, she
stared through the windshield into the stormy darkness, somewhere
north of the border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
Middle of nowhere.

There was a brilliant streak of lightning.
In the split second illumination she saw a black Escalade parked a
hundred yards up the shoulder.

Thunder rattled the windows. Five seconds
elapsed. When the sky exploded again, Rachael felt a strange,
unnerving pull to look through the driver side window.

A man swung a crowbar through the glass.

3

Will startled back into consciousness,
disoriented and thirsty. It was so quiet--just the discreet drone of
a computer fan and the second hand of the clock ticking in the
adjacent bedroom. He found himself slouched in the leather chair at
the desk in his small home office, the CPU still purring, the
monitor switched into sleep mode.

As he yawned, everything rushed back in a
torrent of anxiety. He'd been hammering out notes for his closing
argument and hit a wall at ten o'clock. The evidence was damning.
He was going to lose. He'd only closed his eyes for a moment to
clear his head.

He reached for the mug of coffee and took a
sip. Winced. It was cold and bitter. He jostled the mouse. When the
screen restored, he looked at the clock and realized he wouldn't be
sleeping anymore tonight. It was 4:09 a.m. He was due in court in
less than five hours.

First things first--he needed an immediate
and potent infusion of caffeine.

His office adjoined the master bedroom at
the west end of the house, and passing through on his way to the
kitchen, he noticed a peculiar thing. He'd expected to see his wife
buried under the myriad quilts and blankets on their bed, but she
wasn't there. The comforter was smooth and taut, undisturbed since
they'd made it up yesterday morning.

He walked through the living room into the
den and down the hallway toward the east end of the house. Rachael
had probably come home, seen him asleep at his desk, and gone in to
kiss Devlin. She'd have been exhausted from working all day at the
clinic. She'd probably fallen asleep in there. He could picture the
nightlight glow on their faces as he reached his daughter's
door.

It was cracked, exactly as he'd left it
seven hours ago when he'd put Devlin to bed.

He eased the door open. Rachael wasn't with
her.

Will wide awake now, closing Devlin's door,
heading back into the den.

"
Rachael? You here, hon?"

He went to the front door, turned the
deadbolt, stepped outside.

Dark houses. Porchlights. Streets still wet
from the thunderstorms that blew through several hours ago. No
wind, the sky clearing, bright with stars.

When he saw them in the driveway, his knees
gave out and he sat down on the steps and tried to remember how to
breathe. One Beamer, no Jeep Cherokee, and a pair of patrol cars,
two uniformed officers coming toward him, their hats shelved under
their arms.

The patrolmen sat in the living room on the
couch, Will facing them in a chair. The smell of new paint was
still strong. He and Rachael had redone the walls and the vaulted
ceiling in terracotta last weekend. Most of the black and white
desert photographs that adorned the room still leaned against the
antique chest of drawers, waiting to be re-hung.

The lawmen were businesslike in their
delivery, taking turns with the details, as if they'd rehearsed who
would say what, their voices so terribly measured and calm.

There wasn't much information yet. Rachael's
Cherokee had been found on the shoulder of Arizona 85 in Organ Pipe
Cactus National Monument. Right front tire flat, punctured with a
nail to cause a slow and steady loss of air pressure. Driver side
window busted out.

No Rachael. No blood.

They asked Will a few questions. They tried
to sympathize. They said how sorry they were, Will just shaking his
head and staring at the floor, a tightness in his chest,
constricting his windpipe in a slow strangulation.

He happened to look up at some point, saw
Devlin standing in the hall in a plain pink tee-shirt that fell all
the way to the carpet, the tattered blanket she'd slept with every
night since her birth draped over her left arm. And he could see in
her eyes that she'd heard every word the patrolmen had said about
her mother, because they were filling up with tears.

4

Rachael Innis was strapped upright with
two-inch webbing to the leather seat behind the driver. She stared
at the console lights. The digital clock read 4:32 a.m. She
remembered the crowbar through the window and nothing after.

Bach's
Four
Lute Suites
blared from the Bose stereo system, John
Williams playing the classical guitar. Beyond the windshield, the
headlights cut a feeble swath of light through the darkness, and
even though she was riding in a luxury SUV, the shocks did little
to ease the violent jarring from whatever primitive road they
traveled.